Cross-Border Banking and the International Transmission of Financial Distress During the Crisis of 2007-2008
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Cross-Border Banking and the International Transmission of Financial Distress during the Crisis of 2007-2008 Alexander Popovy Gregory F. Udell European Central Bank Indiana University January 2010 Abstract We study the e¤ect of …nancial distress in foreign parent banks on local SME …nanc- ing in 14 central and eastern European countries during the early stages of the 2007-2008 …nancial crisis. We use survey data on applicant and non-applicant …rms that enable us to disentangle e¤ects driven by shocks to the banking system from recession-driven demand shocks that may vary across lenders. We …nd strong evidence that credit tight- ened in the relatively early stages of the crises caused by the following types of bank …nancial distress: 1) low equity ratio; 2) low Tier 1 capital ratio; and 3) losses on …nan- cial assets. We also …nd that foreign banks transmit to Main Street a larger portion of similar …nancial shocks than domestic banks. The observed decline in credit is greater among informationally opaque …rms and …rms with fewer tangible assets. JEL classi…cation: E44, E51, F34, G21 Keywords: credit crunch, …nancial crisis, bank lending channel, business lending We thank Santiago Carbo-Valverde, Nicola Cetorelli, Nandini Gupta, Florian Heider, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, Steven Ongena, and seminar participants at the Bank of Finland, the European Central Bank, and the Stockholm School of Economics for useful discussions, as well as Dana Scha¤er and Francesca Fabbri for outstanding research assistance. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily re‡ect those of the ECB or the Eurosystem. yCorresponding author. European Central Bank, Financial Research Division, Kaiserstrasse 29, D-60311 Frank- furt, email: [email protected] 1 Introduction The increasing integration of the European banking industry o¤ers the prospect of important gains in terms of e¢ ciency and diversi…cation, but it also creates potential risks. One such risk is associated with the possibility that a shock to a cross-border bank’s capital will result in a reduction in lending to …rms and consumers in an economic environment that is uncorrelated with the origins of that shock. Given the size and penetration of a number of west European and U.S. banks in central and eastern Europe, their …nancial distress associated with the meltdown of sub- prime mortgages and securitized products in 2007 and 2008 and the run on banks by short-term creditors, counterparties, and borrowers concerned about the liquidity and solvency of the banking sector1, may have led to such a realization.2 The goal of this paper is to put this hypothesis to the test. We investigate one key mechanism through which foreign …nancial distress may have been trans- mitted to local economic conditions, namely the supply of credit to small and medium enterprises. SMEs dominate the corporate landscape in central and eastern Europe, comprising up to 99% of all …rms. Moreover, because of their opacity SMEs may be particularly vulnerable to contractions in the supply of credit. With this high dependency on the SME sector and with immature capital markets, banks are by far the main provider of funds for capital investment and expansion. An important feature of the central and eastern European banking market is its ownership structure. In particular, foreign ownership in the banking sector has grown so dramatically in the recent decade, that by 2008 foreign banks controlled around 80% of the assets in the the region’sbanking industry. The serious …nancial distress of pan-European banks like Erste, KBC, and Societe Gen- erale since 2007 stemming from economic circumstances unrelated to their operation in central and eastern Europe provides a natural experiment to study the channels through which the e¤ects of 1 See Brunnermeier (2009), Gorton (2009), and Ivashina and Scharfstein (2009) for a timeline of the 2007-2008 global …nancial crisis. See Table 1 for developments concerning the …nancial sector in the countries covered by this paper. 2 Signs of the negative e¤ects of the global …nancial crisis on business …rms in emerging Europe through the channel of bank lending were seen as early as the Fall of 2007. For instance, in October, the EBRD’s chief economist Erik Berglof warned that "the crisis in the West will be a serious one which will last for some time and this means it will de…nitely have an impact on our countries [...] due to the di¢ culties and higher costs associated with obtaining credit" (EBRD (2007)). The euro zone Bank Lending Survey indicated that euro zone banks started tightening lending standards in Q3:2007 (ECB (2008)). 1 the …nancial crisis that started in the U.S. spread through out the global economy. Our key data come from a survey of a large group of SMEs in emerging Europe administered in April 2005 and April 2008. The data allow us to directly observe …rms whose loan application was turned down over the course of the previous year, or which were discouraged from applying for bank credit by high rates and unfavorable collateral requirements. While we do not observe the bank which granted/denied the loan, we observe the extent of the operations of all banks present in the …rm’s city of incorporation. By using balance sheet data on the parent banks, foreign or domestic, we construct an index of …nancial distress at the level of each locality in 14 countries in the region, which we then map into data on loan rejection rates. The …nal data consist of 4; 421 …rms in 1; 266 localities served by a total of 141 banks over the 2005-2008 period. The majority of localities, however, are served by just a handful of banks, with foreign ownership of those varying by country and locality. This allows us to answer two important questions: 1) did banks transmit their …nancial distress by shrinking loans to business customers issued by their branches and subsidiaries in the early stages of the 2007–2008 crisis?, and 2) did foreign banks react di¤erently from domestic banks to their respective …nancial troubles? The classic problem with identifying a credit crunch is that …rms’ demand shifts during a credit crunch following the deterioration of …rms’balance sheets. This wouldn’t be an issue if we were studying the cross-border transmission of …nancial distress into an economic area insulated from that distress through all other channels but the bank lending channel. As the sub-prime mortgage crisis was associated since its very beginning with the expectations of a global recession, the measured e¤ect of bank loan supply shocks will likely be contaminated by demand shifts. Some studies that identify demand use the decline in loan applications across di¤erentially a¤ected lenders to argue that there haven’tbeen variations in the decrease in demand across lenders. One problem with that identi…cation approach may be limited data availability on loan applications. However, even when one observes the universe of loan applications, it is still the case that applicant …rms are a trunctated sub-sample of all …rms. Some …rms do not apply because they do not need credit, and some because they are discouraged. This implies a selection process which makes the sample of applicant …rms not perfectly representative of the population. Then it could well be that for banks 2 negatively a¤ected by the crisis, it is the …nancially healthy borrowers that are selecting themselves out of the application process (…rms that do well during a recession), while for other banks, it is the weak …rms that do so, discouraged by news of a contraction in lending. Thus, at di¤erent types of banks, non-applicant …rms may have systematically di¤erent reasons for selecting themselves out of the application process, confounding identi…cation and making it di¢ cult to separate the bank lending from the balance sheet channel. We overcome this obstacle by employing observable survey information on …rms that choose to select themselves out of the bank credit application process, be it because they were discouraged, or because they do not need credit. Thus we are able to account not just for the decrease in …rms’ demand, but also for the composition of …rms that account for the decrease in demand. While there is already extensive evidence on the real e¤ects of this …nancial crisis3, our paper is the only one we know of which simultaneously 1) studies the international transmission of …nancial distress, 2) accounts for the changes in loan demand, and 3) is able to purge the bank lending channel from the contamination which arises due to the changing composition of …rms demanding bank credit during a recession. As such, our paper adds to a very scarce literature employing data on the selection process involved in the granting of business loans.4 This paper con…rms the hypothesis that the contraction of banks’balance sheets caused by losses on …nancial assets and the deterioration of their equity positions was transmitted cross-border to central and eastern Europe in the relatively early stages of the 2007-2008 crisis. In particular, we …nd a higher probability of …rms’being credit constrained in localities served by foreign banks whose parents had 1) a low ratio of equity to total assets, 2) a low Tier 1 capital ratio, and 3) high losses on …nancial assets, including ABSs and MBSs.5 The key results hold both when we assume equal access of each …rm to all banks present in the …rm’slocality, or when we weigh access by the branch penetration of each bank. For example, we …nd that in foreign-dominated markets if the 3 De Haas and van Horen (2009), Huang (2009), Ivashina and Scharfstein (2009), Jimenes, Ongena, Peydro, and Saurina (2009), Puri, Rochol, and Ste¤en (2009), Santos (2009), and Tong and Wei (2009) all provide evidence on the credit crunch associated with the 2007-2008 …nancial crisis.